--- Begin Message ---
Assalamu'alaikum,
Another war on terror. Another proxy army. Another mysterious massacre. And
now, after 19 years, perhaps the truth at last...
The eyes of the world are on Afghanistan, but today a Belgian appeals court is
due to consider a case with disturbing contemporary parallels. Robert Fisk
reveals shocking new evidence that the full, horrific story of the Sabra and
Chatila massacres of 1982 has not yet been told
28 November 2001
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/middle_east/story.jsp?story=107100
Sana Sersawi speaks carefully, loudly but slowly, as she recalls the chaotic,
dangerous, desperately tragic events that overwhelmed her just over 19 years
ago, on 18 September 1982. As one of the survivors prepared to testify against
the Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon who was then Israel's defence
minister she stops to search her memory when she confronts the most terrible
moments of her life. "The Lebanese Forces militia [Phalangists] had taken us
from our homes and marched us up to the entrance to the camp where a large hole
had been dug in the earth. The men were told to get into it. Then the
militiamen shot a Palestinian. The women and children had climbed over bodies
to reach this spot, but we were truly shocked by seeing this man killed in
front of us and there was a roar of shouting and screams from the women. That's
when we heard the Israelis on loudspeakers shouting, 'Give us the men, give us
the men.' We thought, 'Thank God, they will save us.'" It was to prove a
cruelly false hope.
Mrs Sersawi, three months pregnant, saw her husband Hassan, 30, and her
Egyptian brother-in-law Faraj el-Sayed Ahmed standing in the crowd of men. "We
were told to walk up the road towards the Kuwaiti embassy, the women and
children in front, the men behind. We had been separated. There were Phalangist
militiamen and Israeli soldiers walking alongside us. I could still see Hassan
and Faraj. It was like a parade. There were several hundred of us. When we got
to the Cit้ Sportif, the Israelis put us women in a big concrete room and the
men were taken to another side of the stadium. There were a lot of men from the
camp and I could no longer see my husband. The Israelis went round saying 'Sit,
sit.' It was 11am. An hour later, we were told to leave. But we stood around
outside amid the Israeli soldiers, waiting for our men."
Sana Sersawi waited in the bright, sweltering sun for Hassan and Faraj to
emerge. "Some men came out, none of them younger than 40, and they told us to
be patient, that hundreds of men were still inside. Then about 4pm, an Israeli
officer came out. He was wearing dark glasses and said in Arabic: 'What are you
all waiting for?' He said there was nobody left, that everyone had gone. There
were Israeli trucks moving out with tarpaulin over them. We couldn't see
inside. And there were jeeps and tanks and a bulldozer making a lot of noise.
We stayed there as it got dark and the Israelis appeared to be leaving and we
were very nervous. But then when the Israelis had moved away, we went inside.
And there was no one there. Nobody. I had been only three years married. I
never saw my husband again."
Today, a Belgian appeals court will begin a hearing to decide if Prime Minister
Sharon should be prosecuted for the massacre of Palestinian civilians at the
Sabra and Chatila refugee camps in Beirut in 1982. (Belgian laws allow courts
to try foreigners for war crimes committed on foreign soil.) In working on this
case, the prosecution believes that it has discovered shocking new evidence of
Israel's involvement.
The evidence centres on the Camille Chamoun Sports Stadium the "Cit้
Sportif". Only two miles from Beirut airport, the damaged stadium was a natural
holding centre for prisoners. It had been an ammunition dump for Yasser
Arafat's PLO and repeatedly bombed by Israeli jets during the 1982 siege of
Beirut so that its giant, smashed exterior looked like a nightmare denture. The
Palestinians had earlier mined its cavernous interior, but its vast,
underground storage space and athletics changing-rooms remained intact. It was
a familiar landmark to all of us who lived in Beirut. At mid-morning on 18
September 1982 about the time Sana Sersawi says she was brought to the
stadium I saw hundreds of Palestinian and Lebanese prisoners, probably well
over 1,000, sitting in its gloomy, dark interior, squatting in the dust,
watched over by Israeli soldiers and plain-clothes Shin Beth (Israeli secret
service) agents and men who I suspected were Lebanese collaborators. The men
sat in silence, obviously in fear. From time to time, I noted, a few were taken
away. They were put into Israeli army trucks or jeeps or Phalangist vehicles
for further "interrogation".
Nor did I doubt this. A few hundred metres away, inside the Sabra and Chatila
Palestinian refugee camps, up to 600 massacre victims rotted in the sun, the
stench of decomposition drifting over the prisoners and their captors alike. It
was suffocatingly hot. Loren Jenkins of The Washington Post, Paul Eedle of
Reuters and I had only got into the cells because the Israelis assumed given
our Western appearance that we must have been members of Shin Beth. Many of
the prisoners had their heads bowed. But Israel's Phalangist militiamen still
raging at the murder of their leader and president elect Bashir Gemayel had
been withdrawn from the camps, their slaughter over, and at least the Israeli
army was now in charge. So what did these men have to fear?
Looking back and listening to Sana Sersawi today I shudder now at our
innocence. My notes of the time, subsequently written into a book about
Israel's 1982 invasion and its war with the PLO, contain some ominous clues. We
found a Lebanese employee of Reuters, Abdullah Mattar, among the prisoners and
obtained his release, Paul leading him away with his arm around the man's
shoulders. "They take us away, one by one, for interrogation," one of the
prisoners muttered to me. "They are Haddad [Christian militia] men. Usually
they bring the people back after interrogation, but not always. Sometimes the
people do not return them." Then an Israeli officer ordered me to leave. Why
couldn't the prisoners talk to me, I asked? "They can talk if they want," he
replied. "But they have nothing to say."
All the Israelis knew what had happened inside the camps. The smell of the
corpses was now overpowering. Outside, a Phalangist jeep with the words
"Military Police" painted on it if so exotic an institution could be
associated with this gang of murderers drove by. A few television crews had
turned up. One filmed the Lebanese Christian militiamen outside the Cit้
Sportif. He also filmed a woman pleading to an Israeli army colonel called
"Yahya" for the release of her husband. (The colonel has now been positively
identified by The Independent. Today, he is a general in the Israeli army.)
Along the main road opposite the stadium there was a line of Israeli Merkava
tanks, their crews sitting on the turrets, smoking, watching the men being led
from the stadium in ones or twos, some being set free, others being led away by
Shin Beth men or by Lebanese men in drab khaki overalls. All these soldiers
knew what had happened inside the camps. One of the members of the tank crews,
Lt Avi Grabovsky he was later to testify to the Israeli Kahan commission
had even witnessed the murder of several civilians the previous day and had
been told not to "interfere".
And in the days that followed, strange reports reached us. A girl had been
dragged from a car in Damour by Phalangist militiamen and taken away, despite
her appeals to a nearby Israeli soldier. Then the cleaning lady of a Lebanese
woman who worked for a US television chain complained bitterly that Israelis
had arrested her husband. He was never seen again. There were other vague
rumours of "disappeared" people.
I wrote in my notes at the time that "even after Chatila, Israel's 'terrorist'
enemies were being liquidated in West Beirut". But I had not directly
associated this dark conviction with the Cit้ Sportif. I had not even reflected
on the fearful precedents of a sports stadium in time of war. Hadn't there been
a sports stadium in Santiago a few years before, packed with prisoners after
Pinochet's coup d'etat, a stadium from which many prisoners never returned?
Among the testimonies gathered by lawyers seeking to indict Ariel Sharon for
war crimes is that of Wadha al-Sabeq. On Friday, 17 September 1982, she said,
while the massacre was still (unknown to her) underway inside Sabra and
Chatila, she was in her home with her family in Bir Hassan, just opposite the
camps. "Neighbours came and said the Israelis wanted to stamp our ID cards, so
we went downstairs and we saw both Israelis and Lebanese Forces [Phalangists]
on the road. The men were separated from the women." This separation with its
awful shadow of similar separations at Srebrenica during the Bosnian war were
a common feature of these mass arrests. "We were told to go to the Cit้
Sportif. The men stayed put." Among the men were Wadha's two sons, 19-year-old
Mohamed and 16-year-old Ali and her brother Mohamed. "We went to the Cit้
Sportif, as the Israelis told us," she says. "I never saw my sons or brother
again."
The survivors tell distressingly similar stories. Bahija Zrein says she was
ordered by an Israeli patrol to go to the Cit้ Sportif and the men with her,
including her 22-year-old brother, were taken away. Some militiamen watched
by the Israelis loaded him into a car, blindfolded, she claims. "That's how
he disappeared," she says in her official testimony, "and I have never seen him
again since."
It was only a few days afterwards that we journalists began to notice a
discrepancy in the figures of dead. While up to 600 bodies had been found
inside Sabra and Chatila, 1,800 civilians had been reported as "missing". We
assumed how easy assumptions are in war that they had been killed in the
three days between 16 September 1982 and the withdrawal of the Phalangist
killers on the 18th, that their corpses had been secretly buried outside the
camp. Beneath the golf course, we suspected. The idea that many of these young
people had been murdered outside the camps or after the 18th, that the killings
were still going on while we walked through the camps, never occurred to us.
Why did we not think of this at the time? The following year, the Israeli Kahan
commission published its report, condemning Sharon but ending its own inquiry
of the atrocity on 18 September, with just a one-line hint unexplained that
several hundred people may have "disappeared" at about the same time. The
commission interviewed no Palestinian survivors but it was allowed to become
the narrative of history. The idea that the Israelis went on handing over
prisoners to their bloodthirsty militia allies never occurred to us. The
Palestinians of Sabra and Chatila are now giving evidence that this is exactly
what happened. One man, Abdel Nasser Alameh, believes his brother Ali was
handed to the Phalange on the morning of the 18th. A Palestinian Christian
woman called Milaneh Boutros has recorded how, in a truck-load of women and
children, she was taken from the camps to the Christian town of Bikfaya, the
home of the newly assassinated Christian president-elect Bashir Gemayel, where
a grief-stricken Christian woman ordered the execution of a 13-year-old boy in
the truck. He was shot. The truck must have passed at least four Israeli
checkpoints on its way to Bikfaya. And heaven spare me, I realise now that I
had even met the woman who ordered the boy's execution.
Even before the slaughter inside the camps had ended, Shahira Abu Rudeina says
she was taken to the Cit้ Sportif where, in one of the underground "holding
centres", she saw a retarded man, watched by Israeli soldiers, burying bodies
in a pit. Her evidence might be rejected were it not for the fact that she also
expressed her gratitude for an Israeli soldier inside the Chatila camp,
against all the evidence given by the Israelis who prevented the murder of
her daughters by the Phalange.
Long after the war, the ruins of the Cit้ Sportif were torn down and a brand
new marble stadium was built in its place, partly by the British. Pavarotti has
sung there. But the testimony of what may lie beneath its foundations and its
frightful implications might give Ariel Sharon further reason to fear an
indictment.
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